It started off well enough– sleep hadn’t eluded me, so I awoke well-rested and smiling. Physical therapy went splendidly, leaving my body more relaxed than it had been for quite some time. Instead of going straight home, I decided to drive into town to check if any packages had arrived at our mail pick-up service.

As I drove the main road from our village to the small town of Simpson Bay, light reflections off the bay to my right and the lagoon to my left tickled my peripheral vision. Perhaps it was the difference in the composition of the water in the two views, but I found myself gazing at one side then the other, noting striking contrasts. In over three years of living on this island, I had never noticed just how different the two bodies of water are. I guess I never looked at them together before, merely studying one or the other without making much of a comparison in my mind. At least, I may not have been very observant on similar days. But there it was. On this partly cloudy day, the light on the lagoon was soft, unfocused; while the sun and cloud reflections off the briny bay were sharp and harsh. The water in the lagoon was a green-gray, murky concoction exhibiting small gauzy blobs of light; the bay was swirls of blue and turquoise, with stars sparking like fireworks on the surface. My mind told me that the lagoon water should have been in the ocean and the bay water should have been contained inland. A disquieting scene, but nothing to ponder for long. I simply hadn’t paid enough attention to my surroundings before.

Once I noted the contrasts, however, my eyes found other discrepancies. The clouds were so striking in their cerulean setting that they seemed artificial–as though someone had painted them much too “real” on a theater backdrop. They looked like crisp cut-outs of paperboard pasted onto a brilliant blue board, with the white too bright and the deep grays too silver-edged.

And the sounds… Lack of them, I should say. There were no other cars on the road or boats on the water for at least a kilometer in any direction. No flights were leaving from or approaching the airport behind me–hadn’t, in fact, since I left the clinic. No wind or breeze whistled past my ears, although the air was not still. There were no sounds of birds, either. The ever-calling gulls were silent. The smaller birds that should have been chirping from the scraggly shrubs were absent, or perhaps hiding and unmoving. No bird hawk circled in that jewel-toned sky. No gnat or mosquito flattened itself on my windshield as I drove.

The silence was my first clue. I shivered as an eerie realization crept up my spine. Where I was I couldn’t fathom, but I knew I was no longer on the island. Was I even on Earth?

From that moment, the day went from light and lovely to shadowy and surreal.